Drive
In psychoanalysis, drive (French: pulsion; German: Trieb) is a fundamental concept denoting a psychic force rooted in the body yet structured by language and the unconscious. Unlike biological instincts, the drive (Trieb) in Freud and Lacan refers to a repetitive, partial, and symbolically mediated impulse, oriented not toward natural satisfaction but toward a circuit of jouissance. It occupies a central place in the psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity, fantasy, symptom, and desire.
Freud: The Concept of the Drive
In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), Freud defined the drive as "a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic" (SE 14: 121). He distinguished it sharply from the instinct (Instinkt), the latter being a biologically fixed behavior pattern found in animals. The drive (Trieb), by contrast, is not instinctual in a naturalistic sense: it is mutable, historically contingent, and bound to the psychic and symbolic life of the subject.
Freud described the drive as comprising four components:
- Source – "a process of excitation occurring in an organ or part of the body" (SE 14: 122),
- Aim – "satisfaction… by removing the state of stimulation at the source" (ibid.),
- Object – the object through which the drive achieves its aim,
- Pressure – the drive’s "motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work" (ibid.).
He noted that the drive has no essential, natural object, and may find substitutes through displacement, sublimation, or symptom formation.
Freud’s Drive Dualism: Life and Death
Freud’s theory of the drives underwent a significant evolution. Initially, he posited a dualism between the sexual drives (Sexualtriebe) and the ego/self-preservation drives (Ichtriebe, Selbsterhaltungstriebe) (SE 14: 118). However, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he introduced a more radical binary: the life drives (Eros) versus the death drive (Todestrieb).
“The aim of all life is death.” (SE 18: 38)
“The death drive… endeavors to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.” (SE 18: 36)
This theory attempts to explain the compulsion to repeat and the tendency toward self-destruction that go beyond the pleasure principle.
Lacan: The Drive as a Symbolic Montage
Jacques Lacan reinterprets the Freudian drive through the lens of structural linguistics, topology, and subjectivity. He preserves Freud’s distinction between drive and instinct, stating:
“The drive is not a natural instinct… it is a montage.” (Écrits, p. 301)
In Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan emphasizes that the drive is not a biological given, but a signifying structure composed of discontinuous elements. He refers back to Freud's four-part schema, noting:
“Freud’s definition of the drive is a montage of four terms: the pressure, the end, the object and the source.” (S11, p. 162)
But he reinterprets their function in symbolic rather than energetic terms. The aim of the drive is not to reach a goal, but to sustain its circular movement around a lost object:
“What the drive seeks is not the object, but the circuit. It is not the satisfaction that is real, but the very repetition of the aim.” (S11, p. 168)
The Circuit and Grammar of the Drive
Lacan maps the trajectory of the drive as a closed circuit, unfolding in three grammatical voices:
- Active voice – e.g., “to see,”
- Reflexive voice – e.g., “to see oneself,”
- Passive voice – e.g., “to be seen.”
The subject emerges only in the third moment, but even here, passivity is structured by activity:
“Even in masochism, it is still the subject who orchestrates the scene: he makes himself be beaten.” (S11, p. 200)
Thus, the drive's "passive" moments are always underpinned by an active subjective positioning, often through fantasy.
Partial Drives and Partial Objects
In both Freud and Lacan, drives are partial, not in the sense of being parts of a unified whole, but because they relate only indirectly to the subject's jouissance, not reproduction.
Freud described partial drives (Partialtriebe) in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), such as the oral drive and anal drive. He held that in childhood, these drives operate independently in a polymorphously perverse manner, later undergoing "genital organization" at puberty (SE 7: 182–183).
Lacan, however, resists this developmental narrative. He asserts that the genital organization is never complete, and that the drives remain structurally partial and unintegrated.
“There is no such thing as a genital drive. There are only partial drives.” (S11, p. 204)
Lacan identifies four fundamental partial drives:
| Partial Drive | Erogenous Zone | Partial Object | Verb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oral drive | Lips | Breast | To suck |
| Anal drive | Anus | Faeces | To excrete |
| Scopic drive | Eyes | Gaze | To see |
| Invocatory drive | Ears | Voice | To hear |
These objects are not real, but structural remainders (restes) of the subject’s loss in language — the objet petit a, or object-cause of desire.
Drive and the Death Drive
Lacan endorses Freud’s concept of the death drive, but reformulates it:
“Every drive is virtually a death drive.” (Écrits, p. 848)
Why? Because the drive is repetitive, excessive, and ultimately beyond the pleasure principle. It orbits around jouissance, which Lacan defines as a kind of painful enjoyment, a satisfaction that disrupts homeostasis.
Thus, for Lacan, the drive is always excessive — it does not seek equilibrium, but rather traverses the circuit of loss again and again. This explains why the subject is often bound to symptoms, compulsions, or perverse satisfaction.
Drive and Desire
While often conflated, drive and desire are distinct in psychoanalytic theory:
- Desire is structured by lack and the metonymy of signifiers, always deferred and shifting.
- Drive, by contrast, is partial, repetitive, and seeks jouissance, not the object of desire.
As Lacan puts it:
“Desire is one, while the drives are many.” (S11, p. 189)
Drives are the ways desire is realized in the body, through specific circuits that loop around lost objects — always missing their target, but enjoying the detour.
The Matheme of the Drive
In 1957, Lacan proposed a mathematized formula to represent the drive:
S ◊ D
This expresses the barred subject ($S$) in relation to demand (D) — emphasizing how the subject fades before the repetition of a demand that is not theirs, but arises from the Other.
The drive here is not a personal wish, but an unconscious compulsion, whose force originates outside conscious intention.
Clinical Implications
Clinically, the drive manifests in symptoms, repetition, fantasy, and compulsion. These are not merely defensive formations, but structural organizations of jouissance. The analyst listens not only for content, but for the form of the drive’s circuit, its vocal modulations, and repetition.
Different clinical structures — neurosis, perversion, and psychosis — reflect different arrangements of drives and their relation to the Symbolic order.
Conclusion
The drive in psychoanalysis is a non-biological, symbolically organized, and repetitive circuit of jouissance, oriented not toward a natural goal, but around a lost object. For Freud, it is a force that disrupts homeostasis and organizes psychic life; for Lacan, it is the very movement of the subject around the void of the Real, and the jouissance that emerges from this movement.
As such, the drive is not to be overcome or resolved in psychoanalysis — but to be traversed, heard, and reinscribed.
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